Books Archives | Page 22 of 30

Read, Eat, Drink: Author Websites, Pasta Roundup, and The Minimum Sage Cocktail

March 26, 2015 by Maria

Read:

Are you a writer? Do you have a website? If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, get thee over to WordPress.com and sign up for a website, STAT. Mike Shatzkin, a publishing insider who writes a great marketing blog, wrote a post this week that sent shudders of horror through me.

He pointed out that many authors don’t have websites, and even worse, that now some publishers are thinking about building and owning websites for their bestselling authors. This is so fraught with complications (which I won’t get into here, since Shatzkin covers them already), and it’s also shortsighted. The impact the Internet will have on publishing is coming into crisper focus every day, and it’s no longer possible to turn away from the fact that authors must have an online presence. Every single one of them. And that presence must be owned and managed by the author, or by an employee or consultant working on behalf of the author.

I feel a bit like a crazed doomsday prophet screeching about the interwebs sometimes, but take heed, authors, for the Internets shall not pass! The online world isn’t going to go away, and it’s becoming an increasingly important part of our offline world. You need to exist in both places. And if you don’t have a website or some form of social media, you don’t exist to the all-powerful Google, and you don’t exist to the millions of potential readers who are looking for someone like you. So, I repeat, in my most annoyingly nagging tone possible: get a website!

Read the rest of Shatkin’s article here.

Eat:

Lately, I’ve been craving pasta. Just kidding. Every single day of my life since birth I’ve craved pasta. I predict that 50 years from now someone will isolate the addicted-to-pasta gene on a strand of DNA, and I will finally have answers about my condition. Until then, let’s all drool over these ridiculously good-looking bowls of pasta:

Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage

Reginetti with Savoy Cabbage and Pancetta. That reginetti is so cute I could just eat it right up. (I guess that’s the point, huh?) Recipe here.

What Does It Mean to Have an Engaged Audience, and Why Does It Matter?

March 24, 2015 by Maria

Engagement. It’s a buzz word in both blogging and publishing, but what does it actually mean? Is it the next “synergy”–my favorite marketingspeak word that I love to hate?

As I wrote about here, a lot of my process of sorting through potential clients involves looking at hard numbers—traffic stats, social media followers, subscribers, etc. But in reality, what I’m looking for underneath all of that is simply engagement. Does the potential author have a highly engaged audience? Do they already have a large group of fans who would fork over their hard-earned cash for a book?

This could be an audience of millions, in which 10% of the people are engaged enough to make a purchase, or it could be an audience of 50,000, where every last person would gladly exchange $21.95 for your book. The size of the total audience matters to a certain extent, but when it comes down to it, it’s really the conversion rate that means the difference between a bestseller and a flop. (I wrote more about the “stickiness” factor of engagement and conversion rates here.)

Conversion rate can sound like more empty marketingspeak (one of my writing pet peeves!), but it’s really a simple concept that boils down to this: how close are you to your audience? Think of this closeness like you’d think of your real-life social circles, where you have varying levels of familiarity with everyone from your spouse to your mailman. Here’s what that usually looks like:

Deal News: DAMN DELICIOUS by Chungah Rhee

March 10, 2015 by Maria

damn delicious book deal chung ah rhee

I realized this weekend that I’ve been doing a terrible job of announcing The Good Stuff. I’m always so focused on trying to help writers improve their craft and their platforms, but in reality, The Good Stuff can be just as inspiring as any practical advice. After all, the dream of getting a book deal is what makes all the long days and hard work of platform-building worth it.

So one of my goals for 2015 will be to share all The Good Stuff that’s happening behind the scenes of my day-to-day work. And today I’m excited to officially announce a deal that’s been long in the works: Damn Delicious by Chungah Rhee, to be published by Oxmoor House in Fall 2016! Here’s the official Publishers Marketplace announcement:

The book will be a gorgeous collection of the quickest, easiest recipes that have won Damn Delicious its huge readership. It will be published in association with Cooking Light, which means every recipe will include handy nutritional stats and be rigorously tested by the experts at the Cooking Light test kitchen.

I’m especially excited about this project because, while working with Chungah on the proposal and deal, I became completely addicted to her food. Seriously. Her recipes keep us fed around here. And yes, maybe I am not the most unbiased person to be raving about this, but I really am continually blown away by how easy, flavorful, and fun her recipes are. Here are a few favorites that have become part of our weekday rotation:

The Most Important Paragraph of a Query Letter

March 4, 2015 by Maria

Desktop-and-flowers

Query letters are not fun for anyone. Writers hate writing them, and agents are so inundated with them that it can be hard to churn through the onslaught, day in and day out. But as with most painful things in life, they are necessary and unavoidable. A query letter is still the best way to concisely tell agents who you are and why your book is exciting.

Everyone has a different system for reviewing and processing queries—some agents automatically route them to a query inbox and review them en masse, while others only review projects that have made it past the first barrier of assistants.

My method is probably a little weird. I have all queries sent to my main inbox, and I try to review and file every last one of them by the end of the day. This works for me for two reasons: 1. I am a little OCD about keeping my inbox manageable and filing things correctly; and 2. It means I never have a fantastic project languishing in a rarely-checked inbox for months.

Category: Books